Notes for April 13th 2024

Song of the week:

Notes

• I was traveling a bunch this week. First to Poland (the town of Łódź, south of Warsaw) and then through London. No flight could get me home from Warsaw on Wednesday, so I stayed for a day in London before heading home Thursday evening.
  • Once again, London City Airport is the greatest airport in the world.
  • Łódź is a nice little city. It doesn't have loads of character but the locals will tell you that's a-typical of Poland, not just their city. It felt extremely young, but locals seemed surprised that I had that observation!
  • I flew with KLM over there and it was pretty great. They're a million miles from a typical airline I would fly with because they're in the wrong points ecosystem, etc. But I was surprised by how good the food and free in-flight wifi was. All for very short EU hops!
• America seemed to fall over itself with the total solar eclipse. And it happened on the same day where technically Ireland had about 16 hours of total eclipse because of our banjaxed weather.
• Streaming services now have preroll trailers for other shows, then a recap and then the intro. DVDs did this in the early 00s too. The solution is simple; sail the high seas and acquire the content you want. No ads, preroll or nonsense. Just the actual file you want and need. 🏴‍☠️
• Apple bringing in streaming and emulation to the App Store is a huge neon sign pointing to the virtue of competition. No doubt they'll say this is bravery, innovation and best-in-class representation of the app store.
  • This last year or two have been very challenging for me as a lifelong Apple user. This company is fast becoming everything they once stood against because of their stock valuation desperation.
• I built a new mechanical keyboard! It's a lighter touch with bluetooth from Monokei, who are my favourites. Unfortunately the board seems to be borked. I can't even flash it, so it'll wind up being replaced in all likelihood. Which is a huge pain in the backside.

• Between 1978 and 2022, worker pay grew by 15% while exec pay jumped by 1,209%. This isn't right.
• Below is a phenomenal chart of the real time price of energy spiking during the solar eclipse in the US:

Tabs

• Google deals with IDF
• 7 stages of gear acquisition syndrome. Yup. Yup yup yup.
• Grogan's barman passes away
• Microsoft tests Windows11 task bar adverts. This is genuinely indefensible. Get off of that ship now.
• McDanooj
• X premium users can't hide their blue checkmark anymore. hahahahaha
• IKEA has decided to cloudify (enshitten) their home controllers, so here's an open source solution
• The anxious generation
• Preset Galaxy
  • The blog post about it
• Humane AI pin is shit
• Radio signals in space
• Hacker doxxes nearly every adult in El Salvador. Before you get high & mighty, this is similar to the Irish health system hack.
• Revealing the secrets of the aurora
• Photos from the solar eclipse
• Build planes in the air. Oh, Boeing.
• Tesla settles suit with family of man who died while using AP
• Dune review
• New trains connecting European cities. It's actually outrageous that I can't get a train from Dublin to London.
• Increasing AI transparency
• Documentaries to show the beauty of math to students
• IRC client on bare metal. So unnecessary but so worthwhile.
• The mediocre programmer